Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday June 09, 2014 @08:55AM
from the can-we-give-you-a-ride? dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ex-KGB Major Boris Karpichko says that spies from Russia's SVR intelligence service, posing as diplomats in Hong Kong, convinced Snowden to fly to Moscow last June. 'It was a trick and he fell for it,' Karpichko, who reached the rank of Major as a member of the KGB's prestigious Second Directorate while specializing in counter-intelligence, told Nelson. 'Now the Russians are extracting all the intelligence he possesses.'"

According to Snowden, he destroyed all the files once he successfully handed them off to Greenwald. In which case, there's no intelligence to steal except his personal knowledge.

Lest you think he didn't destroy them properly enough, he apparently gave lessons to other intelligence officials on counter measures. So he would be well versed in how to secure and destroy data.

Granted, maybe Snowden is lying. But we have no evidence of his lying. Everything he has said so far has been either corroborated by the government or met with silence. And in some cases, both; for example, he always said that he used proper whistleblowing channels, and the government said they had no knowledge of this. Then more recently the government corroborated one of the instances he claims. I think it's fair to say that the government is either not telling us what it knows, or is just incompetent.

The Feds said they found an email where he asked a question to clarify a point in some training material regarding the ability of Executive Orders to override statues (the way the material was present implied the two were equal but did not say that). At no point in that email did he bring up anything the NSA was doing or state any objection to NSA actions, and the answer he got said Executive Orders cannot override statutes. If you want to interpret asking a question about how a sentence is phrased as Sno

That is incorrect, they released one email in which he asked a legal question about the precedence of laws vs executive orders. In the email, he did not raise any concerns about any programs. It did not verify his story.

Well, mostly because pretty much everything he has announced has been admitted to be true. I don't think I've seen any stories with Snowden-released information where it was disproven, although I could be wrong on that.

On the other hand, the US (and other Governments) eventually admitted that he was telling the truth about the releases.

Given two stories from two entities, one which is a proven liar and one which is not, which would you be more likely to trust?

Well, mostly because pretty much everything he has announced has been admitted to be true. I don't think I've seen any stories with Snowden-released information where it was disproven, although I could be wrong on that.

That is normal in deception campaigns. Release accurate information to build credibility so that the eventual strategic deception will be more likely to be believed. Don't read too much into past info being true, remain skeptical of each and every new piece of info when dealing intelligence agencies and people involved in that world.

For example in WW2 the British double agent Joan Pujol Garcia, "Garbo", had sent real info to the Germans for a while. This culminated with actually sending the Germans real info about the Normandy invasion immediately before the invasion, about 3am - as paratroopers were landing but several hours before the 6am beach invasion, too late for the German's to decode, process and use the info. However this solidified his credibility with the Germans with respect to having high level access to information, it was confirmed that he transmitted hours before the invasion. Then a couple of days later he sent info that the Normandy landing was a diversion and that the main forces were still in England getting ready to land at the Pas de Calais. Mr Garcia is credited with keeping 2 armored divisions and over 12 infantry divisions out of the battle at Normandy. Sending true information was key to the eventual big deception.

Even putting aside the facts that he was willing to break the oaths he took when he got his security clearance

The oath he took was to "protect and defend the Constitution, against all enemies, foreign and domestic"

He's committed many crimes, but breaking that oath does not appear to be one of them.

Among the things included within the Constitution are rules governing who gets to determine how the Constitution is to be interpreted and who gets to enforce its language. Nowhere within the Constitution does there exist a clause that states any citizen is entitled to substitute their own judgment for the authority delegated by the Constitution. When Snowden or anyone else swears to protect and defend the Constitution, they do not specifically swear to defend a couple of clauses within the bill of rights,

I'm pretty sure they agree to defend the constitution from ALL enemies, foreign and domestic. I don't think there is an exemption for government officials who have overstepped their power.

Being authorised by the office of the president, or legislation makes no difference if the law is counter to the constitution. Eventually when it comes before a court it will be declared unconstitutional (assuming the judges are not corrupt, but that's a whole other problem) and retroactively will cease to exist.

The legal encyclopedia American Jurisprudence says the following in regard to constitutionality:
The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and the name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void and ineffective for any purpose since unconstitutionality dates from the time of its enactment and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it; an unconstitutional law, in legal contemplation, is as inoperative as if it had never been passed... An unconstitutional law is void. (16 Am. Jur. 2d, Sec. 178)

Why do you think it is reasonable to expect that people have perfect foresight? He was in a dangerous situation, and not all of the instances where he might have tried to report the problems were necessarily recorded or accessible to him.

I also don't know why you blindly take him at his word.

Who really believes that corrupt government scumbags would care about this, especially when they're the ones who did this to begin with, and many of them still support it?

And for what it's worth, I would have preferred he *had not* gone through the 'proper channels'. The People have a right to know when the government is violating the highest law of the land or people's liberties; not only do they have a right to know, but they should be the *first* to know. By going through the 'proper channels', you risk getting taken out of a position where leaking the information is possible, and then the whole issue would be swept under a rug.

Even putting aside the facts that he was willing to break the oaths he took when he got his security clearance

He had a duty to report the violations of the constitution and people's liberties, silly "oaths" be damned.

he has a strong need to spin his facts and sell his view to keep from looking like a traitor.

You mean like the government? And you realize this is just a silly opinion piece, right?

It doesn't really matter why he did it. He's effectively confessed to a number of espionage crimes.

It doesn't matter to me whether or not he broke unjust laws.

If he was a *just* a whistelblower about NSA's metadata collections, there were ways he could have done that

"And for what it's worth, I would have preferred he *had not* gone through the 'proper channels'. The People have a right to know when the government is violating the highest law of the land or people's liberties; not only do they have a right to know, but they should be the *first* to know. By going through the 'proper channels', you risk getting taken out of a position where leaking the information is possible, and then the whole issue would be swept under a rug."

It is illegal to obey an illegal order and that includes orders to break the constitution, regardless of whether or not it is illegally written into law. It is already a matter of record that the ways of doing it properly were completely and utterly broken, especially when the NSA representatives including the head of the NSA publicly lied under oath. For which they have as yet failed to be charged for the crime committed on public record!!! Also note not, not one single individual has as yet to be charged for the huge level of criminal activity within the NSA. So pointing to laws in this case is to point to empty twaddle, completely and utterly meaningless where the administration, the agencies they command, and private for profit contractors all routinely broke laws and have all have been failed to be held accountable. Which of course also means the US Department of in-Justice is also now just as culpable.

Did a Russian agent trick Snowden, well based upon repeated demands the Snowden be murdered out of hand with out trial by many US politicians, not really, Snowden was destined to go there or remain in China or possibly South America. Would a Russia agent claim extra credit for Snowden, depends upon whether it is promotion time or not, if a promotion is in the offing you can pretty much guarantee it, just like any other spy vs spy type any where in the world (publicly bragging about it is rather questionable unless it was an act of misinformation). As for getting a copy of the data, if Snowden didn't have it, then Russia would simply buy a loose copy direct off one of the many private contractors, who has access to it. Don't forget that copy nabbed at the airport in the UK.

There's probably a significant amount of internal operational knowledge that Snowden has which isn't in the documents he has released, as well as knowledge of other employees, seniors etc which would be interesting to foreign intelligence agencies for various reasons.

Think of it as the operational equivalent of traffic analysis - you can gain some insights into the NSA while not having any access to information about projects etc.

It's not "Russia" but a US resident who used to work in USSR intelligence, so it's a guess that needs to be taken with a bucketful of salt. It may be true in a stopped clock being right twice a day way but it's an opinion shouldn't be trusted without hearing from another source a bit closer to the action who may be able to offer something other than an opinion.

Didn't he release all of his information? What more use would be interrogating him?

I see some possibilities here:

1. He did not actually release everything he had.2. Why would Russia release this information? What do they have to gain from saying this?

He did not.Snowden released ALL of the data to 2 reporters and a documentary film maker.He was caught in a catch 22. If he did not release all of the data, the government could argue he was trying to manipulate the government by only release bits and pieces. At the same time, if he released all of it as Manning did, it could put some people in danger. He's always argued that he did not want to harm the US's legitimate interests.

So he picked journalists that he thought were responsible and he thought he could trust, gave them all of the data and relied on them to keep it safe and only release data that would further his transparency goals. This is also why he didn't approach the NewYork Times. They'd already agreed to hide information they had on government programs with the Whitehouse. Snowden knew this, and didn't trust them because of it. Their complicity lost them the biggest story in the history of the world.

Here's where the plot twist falls into play: Snowden is still working for the NSA but is feeding Russia misinformation. It's all a very elaborate scheme to trick our old adversaries. While the price to pull it off was high with releasing top secret information, it wasn't exactly anything that everyone didn't know or think was happening.

Actually Russian agents within the NSA are leaking real information through what the rest of the NSA believes is false information ans Snowden is involved in this operation playing along with the game, letting the NSA believe the intended plan was to defecting to Russia and feed the Russians false information...

Actually Russian agents within the NSA are leaking real information through what the rest of the NSA believes is false information ans Snowden is involved in this operation playing along with the game, letting the NSA believe the intended plan was to defecting to Russia and feed the Russians false information...

Yes, they were (indirectly, of course) placed there by American operatives who have infiltrated the highest levels of Russian government.

In the first place he wasn't trapped in Russia by an intelligence agency. That was a piece of political grandstanding, and as stupid as such usually is.

In the second place, the actions of the US govt. have more commonly been seen to be stupid than brilliant. This doesn't mean that the actions are more commonly stupid, but merely the actions that one hears about. But this is one we heard about, so I opt for stupid. (Besides, stupid is consistent with the other indications.)

Hold on! I have M. Night Shyamalan on the phone, he thinks we can get Daniel Craig to play Snowden, and Will Smith to play Obama. With some luck we can get the extremely Russian [imdb.com] Sean Connery to play Vladimir Putin.

The only fly in the ointment of this possiblity, is that it was the Obama Administration that suspended Snowden's passport on his flight to South America that connected through Moscow (while in flight from Hong Kong to Moscow), stranding him in Russia (obviously with intent to politically smear him - which has worked with alot of not informed people).

The shortsighted political decisions of the Obama Administration to do this (locking someone like Snowden in the home of the former KGB) for political gain seems like one of the premier examples of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Obviously the Obama Administration made the political calculation (up at the executive level) that it was worth stranding someone with all his knowledge there. Seems ridiculously shortsighted.

Based on the limited google search I did, and this article [freerepublic.com] sums nicely, it seems more like Russia was monitoring Snowden as early as 2007 and then this Boris guy made some pretty outlandish claims about the monitoring.

One more reason why whistle-blowers like Snowden should be protected, rather than demonized. If this is true, then his fear of repercussions is the key factor that allowed Russia this opportunity in the first place.
Even if it isn't true, it's a scenario Americans should be concerned about, because it's highly plausible.

“More importantly, much more importantly, what he’s done is hurt his country,” he said. “What he’s done is expose, for terrorists, a lot of mechanisms which now affect operational security of those terrorists and make it harder for the United States to break up plots, harder to protect our nation.”- Sen. John Kerry on Edward Snowden

“I just think that’s a lot of baloney because, to whatever degree it may be true, they will wind up putting themselves at the mercy of those people who are very effective (at) who are there, who will deal with those guys,”- Sen. John Kerry on dangerousness of Taliban detainees

Let's get this straight: direct release of enemy combatants...ok, release of documents related to collecting phone records of every american...not ok. Political astroturfing...priceless.

""The American people want to trust in our government again – we just need a government that will trust in us. And making government accountable to the people isn't just a cause of this campaign – it's been a cause of my life for two decades."- President Obama on protecting whistleblowers

Remember this quote, remember what he promised? I guess we missed the footnote: "except in cases where I lose political powers...".

If Snowden is a "whistleblower", why did he release so much material about things the NSA does which are not illegal? Why did he release info about capabilities which are clearly under the NSA purview and in the national interest?

Whistleblowers don't just release things that are illegal. Lots of really evil behavior is "legal". That doesn't mean it's right, or that people will support it when they find out about it. Need I remind you about the FISA Amendments Act of 2008? That made lots of exciting things legal...

Some practices are technically legal, but it doesn't mean they should. In some cases the laws are simply lacking and new ones should be defined (especially true in technology). It might also be that some practices are technically legal through loopholes which allow you to do something legally in the letter of the law even if against the spirit. In other cases the laws are actually made with the required loopholes, a blatant example defining some practices which are clearly torture as not being torture to be

if your government does things that are illegal under its own laws, yes. There are limits to "national security", too.

Just yesterday I saw the movie "Judgment at Nuremberg" again (good one if you ever get a chance to watch it). It shows very well how "normal", honest, just and generally morally integer people, judges, can become accomplices of an unjust, horrible, inhuman regime. All it takes is thinking it was for the "national security", for the "greater good", for the "defense of the nation", and that it

I'm not sure it's possible to "trick" somebody who fled the U.S. to hang out with the Peace and Freedom Loving Peoples of the PRC. Unless Snowden is a completely gullible idiot, it's beyond ludicrous to think he didn't know that months of intelligence extraction awaited him after a flight to Russia.

Frankly, I don't understand the guy. There are plenty of better options that would have been available to him; I still can't figure why he chose the PRC as a first stop. Once he got stuck there, his options were between slim and none.

There are plenty of better options that would have been available to him

Erm... it's like people didn't pay attention at all. Governments forced planes to land on the mere suspicion that Snowden might've been riding on them. Multiple countries denied his requests for asylum. Flying around a lot would have endangered him even further.

Instead of flying from Honolulu to Hong Kong, there are any number of Western European states he could have flown to prior to going public.

You forget over whose airspace the Bolivian president's plane was forced down. He knew damn well any western European nation would have fallen all over itself to rush him into US custody, preferably secretly.

Flying to a nominal US adversary and ending up in an actual US adversary was his only option. US allies are obviously eager to break their own laws and their own human rights treaties if the US government says so.

He was in Hong Kong, not in the "PRC". Document yourself instead of spouting nonsense.

And he knew the FSB was going to be interested in him, he was just hoping to leave Russia ASAP to go to South America. The Obama administration revoked his passport, stranding him in Russia. Furthermore, I believe that most of what Snowden gave to Greenwald, the FSB/Russian intelligence knew already: NSA, like many other US agencies have had its share of moles [edwardjayepstein.com].

I'm not sure it's possible to "trick" somebody who fled the U.S. to hang out with the Peace and Freedom Loving Peoples of the PRC. Unless Snowden is a completely gullible idiot, it's beyond ludicrous to think he didn't know that months of intelligence extraction awaited him after a flight to Russia.

Frankly, I don't understand the guy. There are plenty of better options that would have been available to him; I still can't figure why he chose the PRC as a first stop. Once he got stuck there, his options were between slim and none.

Plenty of options? Like going to congress where the hard liners were calling for his execution? The truth is that it was hard line bullshitters like that which drove Snowden to Russia. The US political class shot it self in the foot with its come-down-on-him-like-a-ton-of-bricks attitude and now Russia is benefitting. It's basically a reverse of the situation faced during the Cold War by people who had legitimate reason to criticises the Soviet system had no way of doing so except by defecting to the west to avoid being locked away. Perhaps you should ask yourself why the only place from which the NSA and the US govt. can be safely criticisesd these days on certain issues without having to fear being disappeared into some CIA run solitary confinement unit, is a shark tank like Putin's Russia?

If Snowden hadn't been treated like a traitor by his country, he wouldn't've had to flee in the first place. Uncle Sam only have himself to blame if snowden is spilling the beans in Russia.

You don't understand the event sequence, so you are wrong. It went like this.
1) Snowden steals a bunch of documents in secret. He flies to Hong Kong. At this point, nobody knows anything about him or what he has done except Snowden himself.
2) While in Hong Kong, Snowden gives a bunch of documents to various members of the press and holds a press conference to announce what he has done and to point out that he "had" to do it because it was the only way to let the American people know the truth.
3) The US government wakes up and realizes it has a really big problem on its hands. It's only now that the "traitor" charges begin and the US leans on China to send him back, instead prompting China to turn a blind eye as Russia agrees to make this its problem and headache to deal with. This gets China off the hook, although the Chinese have surely previously copied Snowden's stuff and possibly reached a deal with the USSR, cough cough, I mean Russia to share with each other what they find out.

One of the things Snowden exposed is how utterly shambolic the NSA is and how there is a vast attack surface which would be highly vunerable to foreign agencies or even organized crime. If China and Russia didn't already have access to what an external contractor in Hawaii like Snowden had then they wouldn't have been trying at all.

Chinese have surely previously copied Snowden's stuff and possibly reached a deal with the USSR

The press already have it so there's no reason for governments to make deals - a few bucks or a cheap favor to a paper and they've got the lot.

If Snowden hadn't been treated like a traitor by his country, he wouldn't've had to flee in the first place. Uncle Sam only have himself to blame if snowden is spilling the beans in Russia.

You don't understand the event sequence, so you are wrong. It went like this.

1) Snowden steals a bunch of documents in secret. He flies to Hong Kong. At this point, nobody knows anything about him or what he has done except Snowden himself.

2) While in Hong Kong, Snowden gives a bunch of documents to various members of the press and holds a press conference to announce what he has done and to point out that he "had" to do it because it was the only way to let the American people know the truth.

3) The US government wakes up and realizes it has a really big problem on its hands. It's only now that the "traitor" charges begin and the US leans on China to send him back, instead prompting China to turn a blind eye as Russia agrees to make this its problem and headache to deal with. This gets China off the hook, although the Chinese have surely previously copied Snowden's stuff and possibly reached a deal with the USSR, cough cough, I mean Russia to share with each other what they find out.

Sorry, you're off by quite a bit there.

Snowden knew what the NSA Was doing.He didn't want to release it because Obama was going to win and promised to end the secret programs.Obama took office and not only did the program continue, it was ramped up. Snowden saw whistleblowers getting nailed all over the place.The NSA actually FRAMED one guy. Litterally framed him. When the documents were found to be fake the feds dropped the case.Snowden then realized that there would be no fair trail inside the US. He would be framed as well.He also saw how other leakers had released information to a single news source and that news source had spiked the story at the whitehouses request.He contacted 3 journalists over a period of months and setup a meeting in Hong KongWith multiple media sources, no single org could stop the story. If one covered it up, the others could release it.The journalists met him in a hotel room there where they interviewed him over a period of a week or two. He gave them all the data.They sent some of their documents back to the US for stories and then watched the whitehouses reaction.They hoped there would be an immediate turn around in policy as the public realized what was going on and the NSA realized what snowden had stolen.Instead President Obama came out and flatly lied to the public. Not just a little, not just speaking out of context, he told bold faced lies and members of the justice department and congress went along with him.Snowden realized this meant it was an institutional conspiracy. There would be change without releasing all of the data.So Snowden went public because he wanted to counter what was so obviously a lie. Without an "inside man" to explain how things really worked the president could spin the story any way he wanted to. By being the face to the story, he made it very real to most Americans.

Have no doubt, he sacrificed himself for us. I don't know what else he does or his political views. I'm sure there are things about him I'd dislike or even hate. But if more of us could have a moment of clarity like he did, if we could do the right but painful thing that needed to be done more often, we'd all be better off.

Those whistleblower channels? He did know about them - and what had happened to those who tried to utilize them (Drake, Binney, et al). Don't sit back and wait for "reports" to be handed to you, do your own research (unless you enjoy the smell of soap-scented paper).

As for the GP's suggestion that he should just suck it up and serve some prison time - what? Really, what? The US government tortured Manning with solitary for almost a year - before Manning was even convicted - and Manning had less on their dir

Saying it was a trick flagrantly ignores the fact that the vast majority of more than 75 nations would openly and gladly transfer snowden to the United States. As a nation all we'd have to do is threaten to withhold/offer to increase aid to the target nation and in turn theyd cough him up post-haste. this doesnt account for the numerous countries with dictatorial governments favorable to our interests in which we could simply just ask.
Russia is one of a handful of successful foreign nations with the power, both economically and militarily to resist whatever the US asks for. Sending cia agents to him for rendition is a suicide mission, both militarily and politically. We are beholden to 5% of our oil supply from Russia, and the last time we offered an economic incentive was when we bought up a few hundred nuclear missiles from them and converted the payload to nuclear fuel in the 80's so we arent exactly an economic juggernaut in their world.

snowden was smart to take the Russian offer. He was going to expose clandestine secrets about the United States government that fly in the face of the constitution and our rule of law, and Russia saw nothing but gain from his efforts. finally, after 50 years of chest thumping freedom and swinging-dick foreign policy, a piping hot dish of humble pie had been prepared to which America would reluctantly have to at least take a bite and say, "Politically we're no less reprehensible than any other nation. we just have better propaganda."

Russia didn't make an "offer". He was stranded in the Moscow international airport. Unlike most nations, Russia pretends that its airport is international territory. That allows them to ignore asylum requests which it would otherwise have to hear under international law.

There are lots of other people stuck in the Moscow airport, but they all have valid passports, so eventually they run out of money or get tired and move on to another country. Snowden, however, no longer had a passport. That means he was stu

I don't think "trick" applies here. Snowden went to Russia only after pretty much all other options had been closed off by the Obama administration. If instead of going batshit insane on Snowden, the administration had quietly tolerated (or even encouraged) asylum in some small South American nation, the Russians wouldn't have him and the US secret service could keep an eye on him.

He thought it was just a stopover on the way to South America. I don't think the russians were the ones preventing him from continuing onwards though. If you'll recall the US was having planes from Moscow to South America diverted so they could be searched. It was a proud fucking moment.

Boris Karpichkov worked as a KGB agent in the 1980s before fleeing to Britain as a place of safety. He talks about his career, why Russian spies are again targeting Britain – and why he'll never stop looking over his shoulder...
Karpichkov, it turns out, knows a huge amount: about Russia's murky arms sales abroad, for example. He is intelligent, and a first-class analyst – but, of course, he has no one to report to.
Karpichkov says he is "no way scared". But he confesses he is now "dead tired" of the exhausting world of espionage, and concerned for the safety of his wife and grownup children.

Oleg Kalugin:
[wikipedia.org]

With the return to power of elements of the KGB, most notably Vladimir Putin, Kalugin was again accused of treason. In 2002 he was put on trial in absentia in Moscow and found guilty of spying for the West.[3] He was sentenced to fifteen years in jail,[6] in a verdict he described as "Soviet justice, which is really triumphant today".[7] The US and Russia have no extradition treaty.[7]
Kalugin currently works for the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI CENTRE) is a member of the advisory board for the International Spy Museum.[8] He remains a critic of Vladimir Putin, a former subordinate, whom he called a "war criminal" over his conduct of the Second Chechen War.[3][9]

So Boris, who depends on Western intelligence services to avoid being assassinated, as other Russian spies who fled to Britain have been, says what his protectors want him to. Business Insider is just plain stupid to publish this.

Snowden asserts that he brought no classified files with him when he left the US.

And Russian intelligence has good reasons for spreading a story like this, even if it's false. It makes Russia look smart and the US look stupid. And it will likely the US to abandon a variety of intelligence assets for fear that they are compromised.

How can anybody be so naive as to think that NSA isn't already crawling with Russian spies? Everything NSA knows, its Russian counterpart knows nearly at the same time. It doesn't take a Snowden to achieve that. Remember: Russians have a long tradition of building up sleeper and secret agents in foreign targets, and they are renowned for their patience and the time they take in placing those agents in high positions.

First, he's a nobody who didn't get away with anything...Then, he's a script kiddie who got away with a few things...Then, he's an average IT person who probably got help...Then, he's a mastermind terrorist trying to topple the U.S. government...

Now... he's a dupe of the Russian spy agencies.

Next month, he'll be a long-term deep-cover Russian mole sent to steal all the U.S. secrets...Month after that, he'll be the next Bond villain, sitting is his swivel chair and stroking his white cat;)

You are cheating on your wife, and have been doing so for some time now. A good friend of hers finds out about what you're doing and tells your her. At this point, people are going to be pissed off at one of two people. People loyal to you are going to be pissed off at your wife's friend for ratting you out. People loyal to her are going to be pissed off at you, and see your wife's friend as a hero. That's just the way things work. So you can always tell where someone's loyalties really lie by determining whom they are pissed off at.

In this situation, the secret police/military complex/power elite/establishment is effectively screwing over the general public and the Constitution (the highest law of that land, for those that are unfamiliar), and has been doing so for some time now. Someone finds out about what they're really doing and tells us. At this point, people are pissed off at one of two people (or groups of people). People who are loyal to the secret police/military complex/power elite/establishment are pissed off at Snowden for ratting them out. People loyal to the general public and Constitution are pissed off at the people screwing them, and see him as a hero.

I'm not trying to scream "shill" to every person who wants Snowden's head on a pike, but you'd better believe that any prominent figure who is crying traitor day in and day out in the public media, well, you know where their loyalties lie is all I'm saying. It's not too hard to figure it out.

In a story as touchy as Snowden's, nothing is as simple as you make it out to be. Not your theory, not the GP's theory. There are probably thousands of strings being pulled as we converse on the subject, and we have no idea.

Sorry, it's more like, "one nation's government wants to lock him up for what he did to them, another nation's government wants to lock him up for what he can do for them, and other nations don't want him at all, but will probably hand him over to one or the other in due course."

People like to prattle on about the tree of liberty and refreshing it with the blood of patriots and tyrants; they always forget the part about the consequences of getting the short end of the stick being rather severe. Mr. Snowden's only real mistake was thinking that he was individually smart enough to take on these world powers and personally win, when in reality he's never going to be free from the machine.

If he wanted to be free and to have done this, he'd have had to move some place isolated, remote, and where he could be somewhat anonymous, and to have released his documentation through several intermediaries. Some place like rural west-central Australia, for example. Unfortunately for him he chose to be known in his releases, and he'll end up paying for that choice for the rest of his life, and possibly with his life.

From the sounds of his interviews, I think he believed that the information would carry more weight if the source was know. If these were just anonymous leaks, they would be easier to discredit. It seems like he was fully aware of the dangers, and what he would be giving up, and decided it was worth it.

I think he was right, the leaks carry more weight with a name behind them, and further, its clear to the public that he wouldn't put himself in this position just for the "fun" of releasing false information.

Is there any evidence at all that he had contact with Russia prior to ending up there? As far as I know, there isn't.

Yeah. I'll admit my memory of the topic isn't perfect, but I thought it was the folks at wikileaks that that were trying to help him and suggested Russia was the safest stopover point.

You are correct it was Wikileaks that bought him his plane tickets out of Hong Kong when China was looking like they were about to give him up to the US. Russia was supposed to just be a stop where he was supposed to get on a plane bound for Cuba then Ecuador. But the US state department revoked his passport preventing him from leaving the airport in Russia after sitting in the international lobby for weeks unable to leave, Russia gave him a one year grant of asylum. This is just a bunch of political propaganda to discredit Snowden.

Also remember the US forced a landing of the jet carrying the President of Bolivia because we thought that Snowden might be on board.

The only reason Snowden is in Russia is Because the US government has trapped him there.

If the US really was concerned about Snowden giving US secrets to Russia, why not reinstate his passport so he can leave? They're the reason he's stranded in Russia, not because Snowden wanted to go there.

Also, I don't see any reason for Russia to have any interests in Snowden's intelligence.

On the contrary, I see 2 reasons NOT to:

- Russia probably knows most of this already. That's the country with FSB/KGB/etc.: They've been at this spying game for a long time and have a lot of experience. If a lone guy like Edward can pull such an operation without much help, imagin what Russia could do with way more ressources. (Ditto for China).

- Because he's known, it would be a diplomatic problem to openly use snowden

Before we start discussing whether Mr. Snowden has been tricked by KGB or not, we need to look at what kind of fella that Boris Karpichko is

Boris Karpichko fled to Britain from Russia and sought political asylum in the 1998 - and as a "living asset" of the UK government he has to do something in return for the protection the UK government has given him

Hence, the same Boris Karpichko has made extraordinary claims throughout the years. I'll list only 2 below (and there are more but to save space I'll just list two)

I'm sure the US government is astroturfing anti Snowden propaganda like mad. No sane citizen would actually think Snowden is a traitor or even managed to harm US interests, where "US interests" is defined as the interests of the American people and not the interests of the kleptocratic psychos who make up the ruling class.

I also consider myself to be a sane citizen. While I am grateful that the NSA's metadata collection activities were exposed, Snowden did much more than that. If he'd been some low-level NSA worker who stumbled on the NSA's meta-data collection operations in the US in the normal course of duty and felt compelled to blow the whistle and stand up to take the consequences...well, that'd be one thing. As it looks now, he's not much more than a deliberate spy who knowingly committed espionage with a "good reason" who lied, stole data, and fled prosecution, much like Jonathon Pollard (q.v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J... [wikipedia.org], Pollard sold classified data to Israel because he didn't think it was right to withhold intelligence information from our ally).

Saw this in Slate magazine of all places, not exactly a right-wing publication:

It is true that Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance of American citizens—far vaster than any outsider had suspected, in some cases vaster than the agency’s overseers on the secret FISA court had permitted—have triggered a valuable debate, leading possibly to much-needed reforms.If that were all that Snowden had done, if his stolen trove of beyond-top-secret documents had dealt only with the NSA’s domestic surveillance, then some form of leniency might be worth discussing.

But Snowden did much more than that. The documents that he gave the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.” In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.

*Correction, Jan. 6, 2013: This article originally stated that Edward Snowden had not released any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any other countries. In fact, he leaked documents that detail the cyber-operations of Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand.

These operations have nothing to do with domestic surveillance or even spying on allies. They are not illegal, improper, or (in the context of 21st-century international politics) immoral. Exposing such operations has nothing to do with “whistle-blowing.”

Among other things, Snowden signed an oath, as a condition of his employment as an NSA contractor, not to disclose classified information, and knew the penalties for violating the oath.

In fact, as Snowden himself told the South China Morning Post, he took his job as an NSA contractor, with Booz Allen Hamilton, because he knew that his position would grant him “access to lists of machines all over the world [that] the NSA hacked.” He stayed there for just three months, enough to do what he came to do.

Mark Hosenball and Warren Strobel of Reuters later reported, in an eye-opening scoop, that Snowden gained access to his cache of documents by persuading 20 to 25 of his fellow employees to give him their logins and passwords, saying he needed the information to help him do his job as systems administrator. (Most of these former colleagues were subsequently fired.)

[Snowden] gets himself placed at the NSA’s signals intelligence center in Hawaii for the sole purpose of pilfering extremely classified documents. (How many is unclear: I’ve heard estimates ranging from “tens of thousands”

The documents that he gave the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.” In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.

[slaps forehead smartly] Do you have any idea how blindingly obvious ALL of that crap is? No one with a functioning brainstem, and that includes Iran, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Russia, China, the King of Siam and the boogey man, is the least bit surprised that the NSA has been doing all that. The only red flag is the part about "tracking people whose movements [happen to] intersect", which, with the fact of an all-seeing eye scrutinizing every single person's life, is the whole point of Snowden's revelation of blatant unconstitutional overreaches.

Furthermore, mere revelation that the NSA has been engaged in those processes conveys no useful information whatsoever to any enemy of the US.

Jesus wept to think that so many people are getting hoodwinked by this crap.

If he was really working with Russia he wouldn't have left at all. The whole point of being a double agent is to not out yourself. Since the NSA seemed to be so incompetent to allow him to download massive amounts of classified data he could have easily passed it on the Russia without detection or needing to leave the country. He left because he did not want to be silenced and rot in prison while the NSA kept chugging along with no one else the wiser.

The intelligence revealed in the media has done more to drive wedges between the Americans and their allies at a time when both China and Russia have taken on a more aggressive foreign policy.

So then maybe the US government shouldn't have been doing things that would piss off their allies? Being a rapist, murderer, etc. also tends to drive wedges between the criminal and their friends. But that's squarely on their own head not the person who told the world they were a criminal.

He is a "useful idiot" with a lot of information in his pocket. When they are finished with him, he is either going to be returned to the U.S or he is just going to "disappear" into the abyss.

Snowden's principal value to the Russians is for propaganda purposes, and this was the case all along. Making one's opponents look very bad is quite thoroughly valuable from a diplomacy perspective, since it persuades third parties (e.g., most of Latin America and Africa) to be more receptive to your message.

If he was working for the Russians all along, he would have simply stayed put and kept stealing secrets. No need to flee anywhere. He also wouldn't give a fuck about the domestic spying aspect, if he wanted to drive a wedge he could have released that part anonymously while giving all the other juicy secrets to the Russians.